Roundup: A ten-year health “deal”

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Before the big meeting between Justin Trudeau and the premiers, Trudeau had a one-on-one meeting with Alberta premier Danielle Smith, and it was…awkward. From her limp handshake to her hectoring about the “just transition” term, it was certainly something.

When the big meeting did happen, Trudeau and his ministers kept the attention on the big number: $198 billion over ten years, of which $46.2 billion is new funds, beyond planned increases in the Canada Health Transfer, and other promised funds for things like boosting the pay of long-term care workers and to hire front-line health workers. I am curious about this immediate $2 billion with no strings attached, intended to help meet things like surgical backlogs, but which you know premiers are going to use elsewhere (at least two of them have imminent elections) because they will immediately cry that this is one-time funding and not stable, long-term predictable funding. The increase to the transfer is tied to better data and increased digitization (which, frankly, was supposed to have been completed by now), plus $25 billion for the one-on-one deals with each province to meet specific needs, and finally another $2 billion over ten years for Indigenous health outcomes.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/1623077585847726080

Of course, premiers aren’t happy because it wasn’t as much money as they wanted, and there are strings. Some, like Doug Ford, kept trying to spin this as “a down payment” when the federal government was pretty quick to say this money is it. And then you get former premiers like Jean Charest coming out of the woodwork to insist that strings attached is “risky,” while he repeats the straw man arguments that the federal government is trying to “run emergency rooms,” which absolutely nobody has ever stated, while the federal government just wants health dollars to be spent on healthcare. Nevertheless, the message from the federal ministers is that they expect these one-on-one deals with provinces to be signed in weeks, not months, because they want this all done before the federal budget. The Star has a look at how the logjam broke down, a little at a time.

“Losing control”

One of my perpetual pet peeves of mainstream media in this country is this insistence that we want MPs to be more independent, but the moment they show a glimmer of independence, we rend our clothes and wail that the leader is “losing control” of his or her caucus, and lo, it’s happening again. The story is about a group of Liberals, mostly from Montreal, who have taken exception with the preamble of the official languages legislation which recognises Quebec’s provincial language laws, which they object to both because it restricts anglophones in the province, but because a federal bill shouldn’t enshrine a provincial law in federal statute, and it was a dumb move by the federal drafters to put that in the bill. And one of the Liberals’ Franco-Ontarian MPs is pushing back. OH NOES! Trudeau is “losing control” of his caucus, as opposed to “he drafted a sloppy bill,” or “the minister didn’t consult her own gods damned caucus first.” The narrative is “losing control.” Zeus wept.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 350:

Ukrainian forces are claiming to have killed 1,030 Russian troops overnight on the front lines in the eastern part of the country. Meanwhile, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has thanked parliament for approving his new cabinet picks as he shuffles up his ministers, including the defence minister.

Good reads:

  • The Canadian government has authorized an initial $10 million in aid to Türkiye and Syria, with more to come in the near future.
  • A Canadian surveillance plane is heading home after two intelligence-gathering flights over Haiti.
  • The Canadian government is spending $2 million for the International Commission on Missing Persons at the Hague to assist with Indigenous unmarked graves.
  • The Canadian Forces are having a hard time building up our NATO deterrence mission in Latvia for lack of personnel, but we’re not the only country.
  • Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem says that we have turned the corner on inflation, and it should return to three percent by mid-year.
  • RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki apparently has trouble with the concept of civilian control as she tries to preserve the banned neck hold.
  • Lucki also says that uniformed officers have been sent as “disruption” to three of the alleged Chinese “police stations” on Canadian soil.
  • One of the public sector unions has filed a bad-faith bargaining complaint against the CRA around remote work (even though location of work is the employer’s right).
  • The integrity of a number of Immigration and Refugee Board hearings are in question after a contracted interpreter used imposters during virtual hearings.
  • A Nobel-prize winning economist says that Ontario could owe First Nations as much as $100 million under the terms of two treaties from 1850.
  • Jessica Davis calls out the unserious vote in the House of Commons on declaring the Wagner Group a terrorist entity, and puts forward more constructive suggestions.
  • Susan Delacourt counts the declarations of victory on all sides from the healthcare deal, even though all of those victories are very modest indeed.
  • My column looks at something Dominic Barton said about what the civil service needs to fix if governments want to address the problem of outside consultants.

Odds and ends:

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One thought on “Roundup: A ten-year health “deal””

  1. Information leaks from Tory riding associations seem to indicate a warning that Poilievre is going to accuse the Liberals of planning to raise taxes because “Canada is broke.” If true, this is another Poilievre addition to his triple, triple triple, BS. This is proof that these authoritarian will say and do anything to gain power.

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